As far as undervalued cryptocurrencies are concerned, this is our specialty: every month we release an in-depth report covering one project that we believe to be massively underrated. The term “moonshot” probably fits Nexus Earth perfectly since these guys are working on launching a decentralized satellite network into the orbit.

Because of the bearish sentiment throughout 2018, the interest for stable coins increased massively which is why we believe you should also pay attention to MakerDAO. Their team created a stable currency called DAI which in our opinion beats other stable coins out there.

Last but not least, there is Request Network which we consider to be “Paypal 2.0” on the blockchain. What’s even more exciting is that becoming the blockchain alternative to Paypal is only the tip of the iceberg for Request Network. This crypto project is a platform that many other companies build upon which means that there are other businesses contributing to the growth of REQ.

Owen Cook, Cryptocurrency Analyst & Writer

The top high-risk-high-reward play for me right now is Republic Protocol.

Republic Protocol is a decentralized dark pool exchange. Members who staked at least 100,000 REN Tokens have the ability to operate a dark node and receive transaction fees for the trades they execute.

For me, it is a strong narrative play. I believe institutional money will be the next bull run narrative, and Republic Protocol allows large buyers and sellers to trade digital assets. Dark pools amount to a decent percentage of traditional asset trading and I believe as the cryptocurrency market matures dark pools will be a necessity for large buyers and sellers.

$REN is trying to create cryptocurrency’s first decentralized dark pool and holders of $REN operate the nodes. Right now Republic Protocol ($REN) is under $30 million in market cap.

Daniel Frumkin, Cryptocurrency Analyst & Writer

Like Ethereum, NEO is a public blockchain which allows for decentralized applications to be built on top of it. It also allows cryptocurrency projects to raise project funding through ICOs and issue NEO-based tokens. This has led to many dubbing NEO as the Ethereum of China.

However, Ethereum has been shown as being able to process just 25 transactions per second (TPS). NEO, on the other hand, can process between 1,000 and 10,000 TPS. Even though NEO can fulfill similar functions to Ethereum, there is little doubt that NEO currently has a much faster public blockchain.

This presents an opportunity for cryptocurrency investors, seeing that NEO’s market cap is only 5% the size of Ethereum’s.

When it comes to application developer platforms like NEO and Ethereum, speed is only one component of its value. After all, you might have the fastest public blockchain ever, but this is ultimately worthless if no one is using it. The way of thinking about infrastructure cryptocurrencies like NEO or Ethereum is that they are essentially building roads or blockchain superhighways. These roads only have value if they are actually used by decentralized applications that have users.

However, not all decentralized applications are equal. Some apps are obviously more valuable than others. This means that the total number of cryptocurrency projects built on a decentralized application platform is probably not the best way to assess the value of the platform.

A better metric would be looking at the market cap of all the digital assets built on each application developer platform. In terms of the value of projects being built on application developer platforms, it appears that NEO comes in at number 3.

However, Tether is just a cryptocurrency where one unit represents a single USD. Most would agree that the $2.7 billion in combined project market cap for Tether should not really be counted for the Omni platform. If so, then NEO would rise number 2 on this list and can be viewed as being the closest competitor to Ethereum right now.

The next thing to consider are the future prospects for decentralized application platforms and the apps built on top of them. The exciting thing about NEO is that the project’s two founders, Da Hongfei and Erik Zhang, both own another company called Onchain. The way to think about these two companies is:

NEO = a public blockchain for applications to be built on top of.

Onchain = a private blockchain for government and Chinese businesses.

Yes, Onchain has Chinese government backing and it would appear that this connection could be good news for NEO. For those that don’t know, China announced in 2014 that it would be setting up a social credit system to monitor and modify the behavior of its citizens. Essentially every citizen in China will have a social credit score and will determine things like the interest rates of loans, whether a person is allowed to travel business class, banning a citizen’s children from attending the best schools, accessing higher education and more.

In the West, such a system would be widely viewed as draconian. But the idea behind social credit scores is that a good person should be rewarded and bad people punished. In such a system, a person’s identity would play a massive role in everyday life and businesses will have a very real need to verify people’s identity. Booking a nice hotel won’t be just of matter of if you have the money to pay; the hotel will have to check if you have a social score high enough to stay in the hotel.

With the already established links between NEO, Onchain and the Chinese government, it is exceptionally interesting that TheKey was recently promoted by the Chinese government at a national level conference. For those who don’t know, TheKey is a decentralized verification tool that stores identities and other big data on the NEO blockchain. There is little doubt that for China’s social credit system to work, it will need an ID verification solution exactly like TheKey.

Although it has not been officially confirmed that TheKey cryptocurrency project is going to be used in the new Chinese social credit system, it appears exceptionally likely for a number of reasons:

It’s a NEO-based project. The founders of NEO also own Onchain and have been documented as working with the Chinese government for some time.

The Social Credit system will require a fast and easy verification tool that can be used by businesses throughout the country. TheKey is an ID verification tool and ticks all the requirement boxes.

On TheKey’s website, they already hint that the deal has been done. What other government authority could they be talking about? TheKey is a Chinese crypto project and so is NEO.

THEKEY Project Team is now developing an identification verification (IDV) tool with blockchain based dynamic multi-dimension identification (BDMI) by using Personally Identifiable Information (PII) which is exclusively authorized by government authorities. THEKEY is a Decentralized Ecosystem of Identity Verification Tool Using National Big-data and Blockchain.

The Chinese government seems to be a fan of TheKey that they have given TheKey a national award: Technology Innovation Award of 2018 Chinese Government’s Information Product, China International Big Data Industry Expo 2018.

TheKey has already been promoted twice by the Chinese government in national conferences.

Maybe it’s all a coincidence, but all evidence seems to indicate that it is highly likely that the Chinese social credit system due to be rolled out in 2020 will incorporate both NEO and TheKey.

What does the Chinese social credit system mean for TheKey and NEO? Well, the social credit system will include every single citizen of China. Right now there are around 1.4 billion Chinese citizens. This means that TheKey cryptocurrency project could have over 1.4 billion active users.

To put that into perspective, Twitter only has 328 million monthly active users. If we are correct in thinking that TheKey is going to play an integral part in the Chinese social credit system, then this will mean a few things:

TheKey will be by far the most widely used decentralized application on the planet.

As TheKey is built on the NEO blockchain, this will make NEO by far the most widely used public blockchain in the world.

If all this comes to pass, will Ethereum really be the most valuable application developer platform in the world? Or will NEO and TheKey with their 1.4 billion users be catapulted up to the top of the market cap rankings?

Even if you disagree with the Chinese social credit system, both NEO and TheKey simply have too much adoption and valuation upside to ignore. With the full rollout of China’s social credit system scheduled for 2020, this could be the time that both NEO and TheKey shoot to the moon.

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